The Messenger
by Impractical Beekeeping
Summary: In the wake of the Subway's catastrophic appearance, a valiant little cockroach has a very important message to deliver. Unfortunately, no one can tell her what it says.


Coruscating Green stirs in her nest of hardened fibres, feeling a faint itch in her tegmina. It is dark in the mop cupboard, but she can hear the distant sounds of voices and the slam of a heavy oven door. She takes hold of her left antenna with her forelegs and runs it through her mandibles, once, twice, and once again. She is grooming the other when she smells the arrival of Lambent Umber.

His pheromones are typically jumbled and disjointed, but eventually she manages to make sense of him: _I itch do you itch something on my wings not the soap powder something else something itches look can you look and tell me what_

Mandibles vibrating with impatience, she ascends the sides of the metal bucket and meets him on the peeling wood of the mop handle. He is thrumming with excitement.

_Hold still, idiot._ She touches him with a stern claw and looks him over, first circling him and then climbing over him and further up the handle so she can see his back. There, etched into the chitinous surface of his outer wings, she can see the outlines of letters:

**Give More Blood**

_You have words,_ she emanates.

_Words what words what_

_Markings. For communication. Humans use them._ She chitters.

Coruscating Green was born in a box of condemned books in the lower depths of the Night Vale Public Library's Restraining Room. Nourished by rotting paste (wheat by-products and animal hides), she absorbed meaning as well as substance. Now that she is several months of age, she still enjoys the challenge of skimming abandoned newspapers, briefs from the Sheriff's Secret Police, Immunity Coupons, and the ever-changing, frequently misspelled menus written out by Big Rico himself. She has read words on walls—in blood, in glowing letters, in tomato paste—and on the pavement outside the restaurant (**Bump. No, this Bump. We Told You** and **Don't Think About The**—, which disappointed her by ending in an unfulfilling, panicked trail of paint). She has never seen words appear on one of her brethren.

_Have I got them as well?_ she asks, fanning open her wings and flashing them at Lambent Umber.

He runs a trembling claw over his own antennae. _Yes yes yes_ he exudes, and clings to the underside of the handle. _what is it what does it_

_What does it** mean?**_ She is impatient with his sputtering. _No idea._ She berates herself for having chosen to live in a cupboard with an idiot. Big Rico's has its advantages, particularly after the ban on wheat resulted in sloppy, liquid pizza variants that customers invariably slosh out of their bowls and onto the floor in disappointment, but still. Umber had seemed attractive when she first arrived, naive despite her education, but now she can see that a well-articulated leg (or six) and a finely-veined wing cannot make up for inarticulate pheromones and a nearly fatal insouciance with regards to brooms. Eggs are not that important, after all. She dimly remembers a book she read on eugenics, and while it was strongly slanted towards Homo sapiens, she is sure no good can come of further association with this moron.

But safety is found in numbers. This is one of the most important tenets of her order (Blattodea). That, and Don't Eat The Things With Red Flags On Them, No Matter How Delicious They Smell.

_Let's go_, she puffs at him. _Come on._

_Where where where_

_We can find some of the others, for a start._

* * *

A small conclave has gathered behind the toilet tank in the Ostensibly Feminine Room. Coruscating Green had forgotten quite how many of them made their homes here. After far too much chittering, she has managed to get them all to line up in ranks so she can read the slogans on their tegmina. And in fact, all of them are labelled as she and Umber are.

**Are You Huddling?**

**Unplug Your Toaster**

**Ride the Trains**

**A Faceless Old Woman is Not Just For Christmas**

**Save The Box Tops**

**Help**

**Eat Your Weekly Bowl**

**Mind The**

It annoys her that she still has no idea what her own markings say.

_What shall we do?_ asks a large, purplish gentleman whose proper name she never learned. He lives behind the pinball machine, which is considered below the salt. No matter: he is now **A Faceless Old Woman Is Not Just For Christmas.**

_I've no idea,_ she says. _But I'm going to the Library._

**Save the Box Tops** vibrates her wings. _Why?_

Coruscating Green hisses faintly. _No offence, but I'd rather be amongst some proper intellects. None of you can tell me what I say, after all._

Lambent Umber's antenna go rigid with alarm. _the library is not a good place they will don't go i don't don't no_

_That's awfully kind of you, but I really must._ She snaps her own antennae forward in resolution, and adds _Any of you are welcome to accompany me. The Librarians are not nearly as alarming as they sound. We can use the Book Depository Cages to enter the building._

She may be a bit of an elitist, but she likes to think she is also highly moral. It's hard to say, of course. She has no strong basis for comparison. The Librarians are quite firm about organisms of any size being allowed into the Comparative Ethics Room.

* * *

They are inching out in a long, shivering convoy beneath Big Rico's car when the sounds begin. A distant rumble, and a metallic scream. A gaping porthole with friendly accessible lighting has appeared. Leaflets are arranged enticingly fanned upon the steps.

Coruscating Green is aware that she is the only one in their number who can make sense of their contents, so she bids the others wait and skitters out to investigate. Minutes later, none the wiser for her slow progress across the pages, she announces that there is a subway. None of them know what that means, but the frantically cheerful tone of the pamphlets convince them that perhaps it would be best to avoid finding out.

They continue on their path to the Library. It's an arduous journey, made in stealth and with frequent stops to accommodate new party members along the way. Lambent Umber is lost when he stops to investigate a partially-consumed bag of Ugh! Potato Chips, only to be crushed under the boot of a panicked human while he is trapped inside.

Coruscating Green feels a moment of regret, but she marshals her troops._ Grieve later, she emanates as she surveys a host of trembling antennae. We must be strong. Keep together, and don't be distracted by greasy foodstuffs. The Library is full of delicious paste, I assure you. There we shall dine in remembrance of our fallen brethren._

She takes a moment of pride in her eloquence, although the effect is lessened by the whiff of ozone accompanying the passing of a Hooded Figure. They march on.

Alas, when they reach the library, all is in ruins. The charred, twisted remains of Librarians rise above the clouds of ash that were once books. Coruscating Green vibrates her wings in horror at the sight.

_What shall we do now?_ asks **Mind The, **who is young and inquisitive. Where is the paste now?

_Gone,_ she sobs in a cloud of despairing scent. _It is all gone._

**Mind The** pats her thorax with a kindly claw. He shimmers with sympathy._ I think,_ he says,_ that we are meant to climb._

_What?_ But then she hears it, over the ping of cooling metal, the human groans of despair, and the whistle of a wounded Librarian. It's a seductive sound, like nothing she has ever heard before. It is like the smell of forbidden toast, the colour of a well-aged cheese. It is the siren call of a dark, safe recess beneath a floorboard. It is freedom.

She shakes her head, because this thing, this synaesthesic message, cannot be right. She looks over the ranks of her companions, and it's too late. Spurred on by the mysterious sound/beacon/scent, they are dispersing. They are seeking out human feet, climbing upwards over rubber and cloth and soft bare skin. She flutters with increasing agitation as **Mind The** gallops away towards a sandalled foot, as **Ride The Trains** rappels up a series of boot laces.

_No,_ she calls. _No!_ But her scent is lost in the noise, and her people move in chitinous, gloriously iridescent waves towards the crowds of people, wing-parts rasping together, legs flashing in unison. Hands bat at them as they swarm the lofty human bodies, but they are undeterred. She does not feel what they feel, the inexorable command to climb. She feels lost.

At last, she stands alone, halfway up the exhaust pipe of an overturned motorcycle. As she draws her antennae through her mouthparts, again and again, a shadow looms above her. She looks up into eyes upon eyes, magnified and multiplied by her own faceted vision. The figure is dark and light and silent and singing. It smells like joy and terror. She starts to scuttle away, to hide herself from its burning regard, but it extrudes an appendage (arm/leg/wing) and scoops her up.

**No.**

_But I...What am I to do?_

It laughs, or perhaps it weeps. It thrums beneath her desperate claws.

**You Are The Message, **it conveys. **You Will Be Delivered.**

_The words?_ she asks. _The words? But I don't know what they say!_

**That Is Not Important, Coruscating Green. Come With Us.**

She is enfolded in a cloud of vertiginous motion. She is lifted. She is plummeting. This should be terrifying, and it is. But it is also, strangely, calming. It is right.

_Yes,_ she puffs into the darkness. _Deliver me._

And with that, she alights in a hedge outside the radio station. It is largely deserted, but for a small battered car, and a man in a white coat, who kicks a dent in the door with a dusty brown boot. "Damn it," he says. "I need a signal."

Coruscating Green sets her antennae and scuttles under the car. There she waits long minutes as the boots pace and kick and tear at the gravel to the sounds of human despair. At last, the human slides down the side of the car and she watches as his phone comes to light, with shattered screen, on the ground beside them. "Oh god, oh god," the voice sobs. "It's gone. He's on the subway and it's gone."

His legs still.

She scurries out from behind a tire and eyes him anxiously. Like all humans, he is incalculably large and warm. His hair falls over his face, shining like perfect wings; like those of Lambent Umber, once admired, then scorned, and now lost forever.

_Have you lost someone?_ she asks, but humans, unlike angels, are not well versed in the language of scent. She chitters to herself, and then boldly leaps upon his boot. From there, it is only a minor climb up his tractable denim legs to the nervous, clenching hand upon his knee. He has not seen her.

She hesitates, but the sound is there, the voice. **Climb,** it says, and **Be Delivered. **She steels herself and softly, gently mounts his large brown wrist.

She fans her wings, dancing from foot to foot, until she sees his strange human eyes, shielded by glassy surfaces that reflect her small image upon herself. Then she stills, bracing herself for an exclamation of horror, a brutal, crushing hand.

But it does not come. Instead, he carefully lifts her towards his face, towards the shining curtain of perfect dark hair. She feels his breath stir the tiny hairs on her legs. She trembles.

"Oh," he says. He removes the circles of glass from his eyes, and burnishes them against the white coat. He replaces them, and looks again.

Coruscating Green waits. She curls her antennae, and straightens them again._ What is the message?_ she asks, although she knows that this man, respectful and intelligent though he be, cannot understand.

But perhaps he does, because he sighs, nearly capsizing her in the gust of his breath. His mouth stretches impossibly into what she has learned to identify as a human expression of joy.

"Oh," he says again. "Oh." He gazes at her, still smiling, although his face is damp with the strange saline substance that sometimes seeps from human eyes. "Thank you," he breathes.

And because she is a very clever cockroach, indeed, Coruscating Green can translate the glowing letters reflected in his spectacles:

**He Will Be Fine.**


End file.
